From Wikipedia:
Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (16 March 1906 – 3 November 2009) was a Spanish writer and teacher. Born in Granada, at the age of nineteen he published his first novel, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu.From AFP:At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Ayala was out of the country. He returned for a brief time, later serving as secretary of the Spanish Republic’s legation in Prague. After the war he moved to Argentina where he lived between 1939 and 1950. There he taught sociology while continuing to publish works of fiction, literary criticism and sociology, notably a three-volume Tratado de la sociología (1947.) …
Many of his writings deal with the topics of power and abuse of power. In general he has not directly written about the war in Spain, but examines it instead through other periods of history.
He was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the top literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, in 1991 and seven years later the Prince of Asturias Prize for literature, the Spanish equivalent of the Nobel Prize. …Ayala went into exile at the end of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war as right-wing General Francisco Franco consolidated power, and he only permanently returned to the country in 1980, five years after the dictator’s death.
